[WIP] Map of Terragaia - Oceanography

I finished all of the terrain, or rather the ecosystem coloring at least. Now, I'm in the middle of working on the oceanography. It's about 75% done, just need to work on the stuff around the South America-ish continent (which is really supposed to be South America and Africa shoved together), the inset for the south pole, and the major ocean basins.

I also added some more water on either side and then, obviously rounded it off, making it look like a real map, at least in my opinion. Of course, I think this looks pretty cool, but I honestly don't expect people on my art sites to really appreciate it, since it's . . , a map.

A Bit of Chapter 15

So, I was thinking, to maybe give myself some impetus to work some more on my story, that I'd upload a bit of it. This is from one of more recent chapters and I think it represents what the story feels like, while not being written so long ago that it seriously needs some red ink and not really spoiling anything major.

One thing I should note, because I don't remember if it's obvious from this. An asperan is an anthro and a calvit is a human. Those terms exist in my world because the word human just means someone capable of speech and abstract thought, more or less. So it applies to both species.

[WIP] Map of Terragaia - Terrain Work

Having fun painting in the terrain for my map. It's not done, maybe halfway at most, but I wanted to take a break and I figured I made some pretty decent progress. I'd say Grandina, Rubicam, Bharata, and the continent for Balkane are done, maybe also the one Kemet is on as well, at least as far as the terrain goes. The oceanography needs some more work on some of those.

[WIP] Map of Terragaia - Base

I've been working on a map of my world, Terragaia, for awhile now and this is my most up to date version. It even includes the names and borders of the countries I have named. If anyone's wondering Theolis comes from the right hand side of the island beneath where it says Llords; it's actually a part of Llords, hence why it seems to lack a label.

Anyway, I realize this is probably a horrible projection and any cartographers seeing this would probably cringe, but it is meant to show all of the continents to scale. That's why Polaris is in an inset, since it's the south pole. And yes, Terragaia is fairly well based on Earth, but I think it's different enough to work well.

Protagonist Faces

Finally got around to finishing this one. It went so much faster after I saved the colors I was using for shadows and highlights. Anyway, in case you missed it, here are all of my protagonists from my first story.

Going across, from top to bottom they are:

   Theolis Wolfpaw, Xano Timbers, Toran Vallant, and Noli Cairson
   Shadow Mooneye, Sarah Nilo, Sakura Tomochi, and Donovan Herrero
   Leon Corwan, Jazz Harden, Jonas Miller, and Mint Green

The last two are Theolis as a werebeast and Shadow without his curse.

Otter Mutt Fursona - Full Ref

So I added some clothes, (that I actually wear) and a tiny bit of information to make my fursona ref an actual reference sheet. Not much else to say, other than I need to get better at generating a good looking reference sheet.

Otter Mutt Fursona

Well here we go, this is my official fursona, an otter german shepherd mutt. Of course, I'll need to do a ref for the types of clothes I usually wear, but with anthro characters you really do need to know the fur patterning, hence the nakedness (even if it is Ken doll levels of nakedness).

[WIP] Otter Mutt Fursona - Sketch

I finally got some time to draw again, so I decided to actually draw what is supposed to be my fursona, as it occurs to me that I've never drawn it before. This is also at behest of my husband, Remmy, who's gone through a fursona change recently. We both went with a more realistic body type for ourselves, so pudginess ahoy.

[WIP] Protagonist Faces - Shading

I haven't done anything creative in awhile, so I decided to try and work more on the protagonists' faces. I've got the top row done and shaded, so I figured I'd add it to the blog since that's almost 1/3rd of the way through the work.

[WIP] A Bunch of Starting Monsters - Sketch

In lieu of drawing character art or writing more story, for the past few weeks I've been playing around in RPG Maker, if that hasn't been obvious. Because, I finished off this one massive map for an area outside the main character's home city, I decided to draw some concepts for enemies that might show up there.

We've got some plant monsters, some insect monsters, some elementals, and a frog. I'm not sure if I'll use them all, though the frog was a pain, so I'll probably use it at the least.

Protagonist Sprite Sheets

Now for something slightly different. Some sprites that I'm doing for RPG Maker. Admittedly, I used the RPG Maker's preexisting sprites for a lot of this, but these things are heavily modified and take a lot of work to get them looking good.

The characters are Theolis (who I actually finished half a year ago), Xano (who's front sprite was done when Theolis' was), Toran, and Noli. It takes a few hours to do these, even having the base sprite, but I think it's worth it. They look so neat and it's fun to see them walking around in an actual game. Of course, this is just 1/3rd of the protagonists, so I have a lot of work ahead if I ever want to do them all.

[WIP] Protagonist Faces - Base Colors

So I added some lines and some base colors and rearranged things a bit, and I'm pretty happy with the results. I just don't know if I want to do any shading or not. I also updated some character designs, like Noli has darker fur, Sarah, Don, Leon, and Shadow have updated fur patterns, and Jazz is blonde, because I noticed Jonas was the only blonde.

Characters are as follows:

   Theolis Wolfpaw, Xano Timbers, Toran Vallant, Noli Cairson

   Shadow Mooneye, Sarah Nilo, Sakura Tomochi, Don Coyote

   Leon Corwan, Jazz Harden, Jonas Miller, Mint Green

   Werebeast Theolis, Uncursed Shadow

[WIP] Protagonist Faces - Sketch

I decided to do something today. Here are head shots for all the protagonists of my first story.

From  left to right the characters are: 

   Theolis Wolfpaw, Xano Timbers, Toran Vallant, Noli Cairson, Shadow Mooneye, Sarah Nilo

   Sakura Tomochi, Don Coyote, Leon Corwan, Jazz Harden, Jonas Miller, Mint Green

The bottom two are special, they're werebeast Theolis and Shadow after becoming uncursed, which isn't much of a difference without color.

On a side note, I'm actually proud how the humans came out, especially Sakura. I actually got super excited at how she actually looks Asian. At least to me, anyway.

[WIP] Leviathan - Mouth and Biceps

Well it's been a bit since I posted something about Leviathan, so have some shots of his new and improved mouth. He now has teeth (that move with the jaw) and a tongue (that's animate-able and also moves with the jaw). There's also an improved mouth texture to boot.

It's not just his mouth that I can move around though; his entire body has somewhat proper skin weights applied. It probably could be better, but it took me forever to do them and now I'm working on making sure the body deforms properly while he moves, or at least the arms, since there are more obvious muscles in there. This next series of pics, demonstrates some of that work.

So I didn't want to batch render out a good animation for this, so hopefully it's noticeable, but Leviathan's bicep bulges when as his arm moves. It took me forever, fiddling around with Maya's tools to get that to happen. At first, I tried Maya muscles, but that was horrible, so I'm having to work with Blend Shapes, which means I have to sculpt everything to look perfectly. I actually had to do this for these biceps three times. 

The first time looked pretty good (even if I did forget to have the triceps stretch), but Maya glitched out and made the deformer mesh vanish before I had applied it to the other arm, I couldn't get it back. The second time, I forgot to make sure my deformer mesh was still applied to a skeleton so I could bend it back into the appropriate position after I finished modeling it. That one also looked somewhat good. This third time though, Maya decided that it wanted to snap all the vertices I was smoothing all over the place, so it didn't look as good, but I got the dang thing working on both arms, so there's that. Anyway, the stretch position is next, then the shoulders, then wrists, then who knows, maybe I'll try to do some jiggle physics so when he moves around all that blubber shakes.

[WIP] Leviathan - Better Texture

So after the arduous process of adjusting Leviathan's geometry so it's not royally messed up, I finally got to UV mapping (successfully) and texturing (semi-successfully) the big spirit. I say semi-successfully because I need to mess around with the shaders to figure out how to make the fin and webbing translucent and make the designs glow and maybe some other stuff. Anyway enjoy Leviathan's final design.

PS: Don't ask why the render's are fuzzy. I don't know, I was playing around with the settings on the shader and don't know what specifically caused the fuzziness. I'll have to mess around to figure that out.

[WIP] Leviathan - Design Update

Just some progress shots on Leviathan's model. I'm not sure if I want to call his design finished or not. I envisioned him as sort of a mix of sea creatures, but right now he's just killer whale, sail fish, and cat fish with some arms and rear flipper fin things.

[WIP] Leviathan - Rework

This may seem like a step back, since this is an un-textured, un-rigged Leviathan, but I wasn't happy with the original mesh. So, I went back to an older version and deleted a bunch of stuff and reworked it. It's much better now; it was mainly his arms and hands but they look much better now. 

Oh, and also, his mouth looks a lot better. This is kind of weird but I am proud that I made something that looks like a realistic mouth sans teeth and a tongue of course, but those might be separate models.

[WIP] Leviathan - Texture

So managed to work out the UVs and did a rough 3D paint texture for Leviathan's base coloring. I think he definitely needs more design to him, but I'm not 100% sure at the moment.

Although you can see the texture seems in the second pic. I'm sure that'll be gone when I do a real texture. I hope.

[WIP] Leviathan - Full Mesh and Skeleton

So I forgot to upload some picks after finishing the full mesh for Leviathan, or the rough mesh, anyway. And it's all in the glorious mental ray rendered, or the settings I had to refind since I couldn't on the last set of pictures.

Of course, because I forgot that means I've done some more work, I spent my last two free days setting up his skeleton and painting skin weights. So now I've got a fully posable whale spirit.

Now, he is missing some eyes and some teeth and probably a tongue as well as any extra frills I may want to add to make him a bigger mix of sea creatures, but that'll be later. My next step is to properly unwrap his UV's and then make a high res version of him that I can to do a normal map on. Then I can texture him. Of course, I need to learn how to do those, so that might take a bit. But once that's done, I can make some scenes with him. It'll be cool.

[WIP] Leviathan

This may not seem like much, but this is actually pretty exciting. I found Maya 2016 for free, with seemingly no draw backs. So, I'm getting back into the game, so to speak, and I'm happy to say this is still pretty easy for me. This is about an hour's worth of work and it already looks like a whale. (Well as much a whale as what this thing is going to be actually is, but you get the idea.)

See whale thing. Actually, I'm planning on turning this into my world's Leviathan (who had a bit of a redesign from when I drew him with Sakura, who coincidentally also had a redesign). So should be fun.

Practice - Theo's Head

Decided to do some quick sketching practice and work out how to draw anthro heads. Then it sort of turned into: let's see if I can just draw a good Theolis drawing and make it look like him. This was the result.

Since the idea was to actually get some practice, I think this is a semi failure. I should realistically be drawing a bunch of different anthro faces from a bunch of different angles, but oh well. At least Theo looks cute. And on a side note I wanted to see if I could make good facial hair since some of my guys do sport some face fuzz. So Theolis got to be a bit of a guinea pig.

Note: Theolis does not have facial hair as part of his design. This was semi-just for fun. As another note, I really should, whenever possible, just fire up openCanvas and sketch some things. I really want to get better.

Wrecked Airship

Well, after some minor tweaks, the drawing is finally done and I decided to add some story information; so enjoy.

Robbie's had one hell of a day. After the airship he was taking back home got co-opted by a senator's political stunt it was then attacked by a group who were most likely terrorists. While a man named, Jerian, helped him from getting ferried away by the kidnappers he couldn't help Robbie when half the airship suddenly was engulfed in a black mass. Now that he’s survived the crash, he’s got to get himself up and find if there’s any way out of this mess. What he doesn't know is that he's now wanted by the kidnappers so that nobody will find out what happened.

[WIP] Wrecked Airship - Way More Shading

Might be done; not sure what else I can do with it to make it better.

Night Fox

These two are Alex and Kitsiyuna; they're characters owned by my brother and were done for his birthday. In theory, they could show up in Terragaia if it were a video game as a bonus arena boss.

Theolis' Family

Along the same vein as Anna and Soren, these four were drawn in between working on chapters for Theolis' story. In this case these guys are actually involved in the same story. They're Theolis' parents (Natalie and Kade), uncle (Luke), and future aunt (Liz).

Luke Wolfpaw

Natalie Wolfpaw

Luke Wolfpaw

Liz Stella

Into the Abyss Characters

These two are characters are for the story involving Robbie. They were drawn in between working on writing Theolis' story. They needed to be drawn at the time, as they had been floating in my head for more than likely a few years, without having been drawn.

Anna-Maria Dumar

 Soren Code

[Old] Theolis Ref Sheet

This is the last 'old' drawing I'm going to post here. I've got some more  but they are from less than a year ago, and it's only been that long for them because I got carried away working on my novel. Anyway, this is a ref sheet for Theolis, which is kind of self explanatory.

And of course, you can't have a reference sheet without a bunch of clothing options. In order they are adventure gear, cold weather, swimming trunks, casual, and career. Unfortunately, I think most of these are no longer up to date, his trunks and ranger outfit are fine, but I want to bring him back to his original, more well dressed, look for his other clothes.